I am currently reading a great WCF book by Juval Lővy (I am not sure if I picked the proper ő sign) which can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-WCF-Services-Juval-Lowy/dp/0596526997. I know most of things that are there as I read almost everything that is in the MSDN on the WCF but the book is written in a way that particular topic is described fully in a one place. I actually do not read it and just walk through it, analyze the code samples and read only those topics I am intersted in, which are:
- Service lifetime management
- Web Service hosting without IIS
- Message Queuing - I like the idea that I write a service 'indepedently' from a protocol it uses to communicate
- Callback mechanism
- P2P mechanisms support
I am already in a half of the book and I can strongly recommend it as worth buying and reading.
OK. The reason why I consider using the WCF is simple:
I need to expose Web Service and allow to communicate via MSMQ - all this for communicating with other environments. My application uses .NET Remoting as an internal communication mechanism and I want to use them both side by side. I don't want to uses IIS to expose Web Services and off course I am eager to try the WCF in a real life enterpises application. I've never tried it before. All I did is few test projects till now. I will post about my experience with the WCF in the business environment usage.